Los Angeles Times' Scores

For 16,550 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 38% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 Sand Storm
Lowest review score: 0 Saw VI
Score distribution:
16550 movie reviews
  1. Wicked Witches is almost like a segment from an old British horror anthology. It’s simple, direct, rich in local color and dripping with irony. But it’s been stretched to about triple its ideal length.
  2. The movie was inspired by a real person but nearly everything that happens here plays as phony.
  3. Lundgren can play these kinds of driven, tortured loners in his sleep. But he still needs a story worth telling, in eye-catching locations, with action sequences that pop. “The Tracker” has none of those three.
  4. The film works well when it’s purely existential — just telling the story of a person with a hazy memory, trying to survive long enough to understand his own life.
  5. Nekrotronic is “fun,” but often in an off-putting, aggressive way. The Roache-Turners have prioritized fleeting moments of gross-out humor and special-effects dazzle over a controlled pace, or careful world-building.
  6. In too many scenes Freundlich prefers the arch heaviness of pained expressions in posh surroundings when what you’re waiting for is the messiness of humans letting fly after their careful worlds have been upended.
  7. Piranhas drags in moments, but it jumps from scene to scene as quickly as the boys weave through Naples on their scooters. The film races at speeds so fast that viewers won’t find themselves bored, even if they’re jarred a bit by the transitions.
  8. Perhaps inevitably because it is dealing with a big issue, This Changes Everything suffers a bit from being all over the map, touching so many bases that, though each is important, they don’t all cohere into a whole.
  9. What is life like on the ground for ordinary people in another culture, another world? That’s been the bread and butter of observational documentaries for forever, but almost never is it done with the kind of beauty and grace filmmaker James Longley brings to his Afghanistan-set Angels Are Made of Light.
  10. f you’re not in the mood for messages or social commentary, however, “Scary Stories” is still fertile enough with its accessible gross-outs and giggle shocks to serviceably add to a legacy of kid-centric mainstream mayhem Del Toro clearly loves.
  11. A heartrending survivalist saga positioned in the proximity of Debra Granik’s indie darling “Leave No Trace” and Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel “The Road.”
  12. The Art of Racing in the Rain, while a tearjerker, is a very strange movie, starting with its mouthful of a title.
  13. Conventional but effectively so, more tense and involving than might be anticipated as obstacles pile on obstacles, this emotionally affecting story knows enough not to push too hard and reaps the benefits from its relative restraint.
  14. LaBeouf brings the soul to The Peanut Butter Falcon, while Gottsagen brings the spirit.
  15. The writing by the director and co-scribe Thayná Mantesso is deft and pithy, and there’s a rawness of spirit in both the stellar central performance and the film’s social realist aesthetic.
  16. South Central Love tries to deal with heavy issues with grace, but its clumsiness undercuts its message.
  17. The individual stories that make up One Child Nation, the worthy winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize for U.S. documentaries, illuminate an entire history of institutional corruption, medical brutality and pervasive misogyny — a history that was both masked and advanced by a national propaganda campaign of near-Orwellian absurdity.
  18. The gender politics are as appealing as the rock-solid trio of lead actors (Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss), even when the movie itself proves less than persuasive.
  19. La Flor, as sweeping and addictive as much of it is, doesn’t have the structural predictability that a more conventional serialized narrative does. It’s too freewheeling, too experimental, too eager to carve out fresh avenues of meaning. At a time when duration is no guarantee of depth, it’s the definition of a must-see.
  20. Otherhood does have a few genuine and genuinely funny moments — thanks largely to its stars — but they’re overshadowed by the bad behavior of both the mothers and their sons.
  21. While Moop might appeal to the Burning Man die-hard set, or for aficionados of the tales of doomed, Sisyphean film productions, beyond that, it’s not much more than a minor curio.
  22. Directed by Sean Mullin, this is 83 minutes of marketing for mega-brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev, but it’s made with enough skill that it might bring some former fans back to the fold.
  23. While “Mean Girls Apocalypse” sounds like a winning premise, and an incredible thought experiment, the result is something narratively slack and intensely off-putting, which no amount of excellent acting can save.
  24. For all its loaded potential to evolve into a gripping look at life in a correctional facility plus an atypical spin on gay longing, the film squanders much of its running time with thin, repetitive scenes of young men behaving badly.
  25. You feel the love in Love, Antosha, that’s for sure. But you also feel something else, a sadness that is close to overwhelming. How could it be otherwise?
  26. The setting and the characters are fairly unique. But they’re put to fairly mundane use, in service of a blah coming-of-age tale.
  27. This movie is a broadly sketched but illuminating depiction of what happens when powerful nations grow weary of sorting through the subtleties of geopolitics and start letting heavily armed secret agents handle diplomacy.
  28. The movie hits all the right plot points but never connects them to a story with any kind of momentum or tension.
  29. Sánchez really has something difficult but necessary to say here, about how sometimes an oppressive patriarchy endures because the people who benefit from it — even if just marginally — won’t let it stay dead.
  30. Without Cage, there’d be almost no reason to see the by-the-numbers revenge thriller A Score to Settle. With him, the movie isn’t just watchable, it’s occasionally riveting.

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